Yup, last weekend at CT FIG at Connecticon we debuted a brand new party game called Master of Pieces!

So what is it?

Master of Pieces is a mid-weight party game about painting, but the best part is there are no actual art skills required! Like Cheer Up!, it’s easy to learn and play and it’s REALLY funny. Unlike Cheer Up!, it requires a little more creativity from the players and rewards you even more for being clever.

How do you play?

Setup Phase

Each round, one player plays as the curator of a museum soliciting artworks from the other players, who are shady artists with lift-screen canvases. In this world, all of the famous artwork has been stolen and cut to shreds, and the artists are trying to pass off knock off paintings as their own!

Curators choose an exhibit card and reveal the awards that artists are eligible to win for that round. Curators also pass around one secret award to each artist that only they can see (they bribed the museum guard, of course!)

Painting Phase

Each round has a different theme, which are all vague words like “Healing” or “Conflict.” In addition, artists will try to tailor their paintings to win more specific awards, like “Best use of red” or “Best use of the human form.”

Artists will have 90 seconds to…ahem “paint” a work that conforms to the exhibit theme. To paint, artists choose a background and put it behind the canvas lift screen. Then they can grab any of the pieces from the middle of the table and place them in their canvas. There are tons of pieces to choose from, from things you might recognize, to funny faces, to interesting people, animals, and props.

The Sale

Once everyone is done, the pitching process begins! In this phase the curator will do a little role play as they ask each artist to show off their paintings. The artists must reveal their works one at a time and explain why they should be the one that is chosen for the museum. This results in a fun back and forth mini-improv game where the other players get to watch the two people talk about their ridiculous painting.

The Awards Ceremony

Once the pitches are all complete (and a little round of applause is given), the curator collects all the round’s awards and shuffles them up. Then one at a time, they reveal the awards and give them out to the winners according to their subjective eye, which are worth between one and three points.

Finally, it’s the moment of truth, and the curator picks one painting to buy for their museum. The winner gets the exhibit card and five points!

Reset

Players reset by putting all the backgrounds into a pile and the pieces back in the middle of the table, and the curator role passes to the next player! First to 21 points after going around at least once is the Master of Pieces!

How did the playtest go?

Great! We played with about 100 people over the course of the weekend, and the initial debut was excellent! We were really impressed with how creative people got with the paintings, coming up with titles we would never have thought of! While there are still some kinks, we got a ton of suggestions and we are very excited about the potential of this game! It was VERY funny.

When will this be out?

We still are planning on re-doing the Kickstarter campaign for The Big D Pack in a few months, which will probably be our top priority. In the meantime, we will be breaking this out in certain cons and events and continue to gather feedback. It will probably be a while before it is released, but we have some awesome plans and can’t wait to get it out there! Don’t worry - we’ll keep you in the loop on social media or via our newsletter!

Hi! As you may have heard, the Kickstarter edition of Cheer Up! is almost sold out. We’ll be reprinting the game this summer, but we’ll be making a few changes. Here’s everything we’ve changed for this version!*

Kickstarter-Exclusive Answer Cards

Some of the backers from our original Kickstarter pledged to get their name in the game. As we said from the beginning, these cards will NOT be included in other versions of the game. These answer cards will be replaced with some of our favorite words that couldn’t fit into the game the first time.

Kickstarter-Exclusive Rules

Similarly, four backers suggested Rules that were also exclusive to version 1.0. We will be replacing three of these rules with extra copies of some fan favorites, like “Sing It!”, and the fourth with a brand new one that we’ve been playtesting for a while, “Joker.” This rule was originally intended for the D pack expansion (don’t worry, we have plenty more!).

Retired Cards

As we explained on social media today, we will be retiring a couple of cards that we feel no longer fit into the world of Cheer Up! You can see a more detailed reasoning on our post, but overall, these cards were rarely used anyway and are a little too dark for this silly game. Since these two cards were in the NSFG pack, we’ll be moving the following cards from the main C deck into their slots, as we felt that these probably deserve to be marked as NSFG anyway.

And finally, we’ll be filling THEIR original slots in the main deck with two perfectly capable new cards that couldn’t fit into the game the first time. Three cheers for your basic poop joke.

Question Contest Winners

During our first Kickstarter, we held a contest where the winners got to write some questions for the game. We will actually be keeping these cards in the game, but with the names removed form the cards to keep the look across all the Questions uniform. Since these were not marked as exclusive and not paid for by our backers, we feel this is the best way to do this while still incorporating these great cards. Special thanks for Jeremy M, Danny V, Kristi L, Leila S, and Mikael H for suggesting Questions that will be in future versions of the game to come!

Quality of Life Improvements

We’re also taking the time to make some practical changes that should make the game a little smoother.

First, we’ve changed some of the syntax of the A+A questions to sound more natural.

Secondly, we gave the rule book a complete facelift. We understand a lot of people are intimidated with walls of text, even with a rule book that is literally two pages. So now there are reference pictures breaking down every part of the round! This also conveniently serves are a quick reference, when you haven’t played in a while and need to remember which part happens when, and also a visual guide to the elements on the cards. The box has also been slightly updated to be a little more shelf-friendly too.

So overall, we’re replacing about 17 cards, and moving a couple around or changing some wording, but 97% of the game will be exactly the same. You’ll be able to play the 2nd Edition of the game the exact same way, so don’t worry about missing out on much if you only have the first edition. We wanted to make the Kickstarter version of the game special from the beginning so we will never be printing the replaced cards ever again. If you already have the game, currently the only way to get any of the NEW cards will be to get the second edition of Cheer Up!, but maybe we’ll release them in a little booster pack some day.

It’s our release-date anniversary! That’s right, it’s been one year since Cheer Up! was released into the wild and we decided to celebrate the only way we know how: weirdly.

If you are on our mailing list, you may remember we had you jot down your favorite word for no reason. This started as a little joke just to catch people off guard, but then people started asking us what we were gonna do with them. At this point, we had thousands, so what better way to celebrate a year of Cheer Up! by giving back what you, the community, gave to us?

So we present to you, the fans, the World's Worst Word Cloud, created entirely with a list of your horrible words. Like in all word clouds, the more frequently a word appears on the list, the bigger it is in the cloud. Draw your own conclusions about yourselves there, but we had to censor, like, the entire center. (Click on the image for an enlarged version!)

It's been a crazy year so far. Here’s what we’ve accomplished:

We attended dozens of conventions and events

We gave away almost $750 of prizes in our seasonal giveaways and at our events

Slept a couple times

And more importantly, a silly game that started as a little hobby has turned into a bona fide hit, almost selling out in the first year.

And here’s what’s coming up in the next year:

Way more events, and bigger ones too.

An expansion pack coming to Kickstarter

Continuing work on multiple new game prototypes, some of which you might get to play soon.

We assume, like us, you’ve been playing Cheer Up! nonstop 24/7 since you first opened the box. And now you’re probably wondering “Gee, I wonder when those lazy poopheads will give me the next thing?” Well, we’ve been hard at work on something BIG and we are so excited to share it with you.

Introducing…

Cheer Up! - The Big D Pack!

It’s purple! Coming Spring 2019!*

Let’s dive right into what’s new! (Note that all designs and all content are in prototype stage and are subject to change.)

A New Type of Answer Card!

NOTE: Art and content NOT final. Click on images to make them bigger.

You’re probably familiar with how the answer cards in Cheer Up! let you combine words into silly phrases to answer questions. Now we’re introducing a totally new type of answer card to compliment the A’s, B’s, and C’s already in the game. Naturally, it’s a D!

You know the A, B, C’s as adjectives, nouns, and verbs, so now the D cards feature locations and situations that will help you answer new outrageous questions. We’ve been spending a lot of time testing out how the new cards work together, and we can honestly say they are freakin’ hilarious.

New Questions and Combos!

With the addition of D answer cards comes new combos. The cards slip seamlessly into the main game, and that means more hilarious ways to use the same cards you already have from the main game. On a technical note, we’ll also be cleaning up some of the sentence structures to make the Q&A’s more natural and slick. (NOT by taking out the swear words. Don’t worry, we’re getting to those!)

The cool thing about the D cards is that you can create new relationships between the same cards just by changing the way you say the answer.

Put locations on top, below, or inside of each other. The basement of a farm. A country music festival on top of a nursing home. A rave under a bridge. Every card can be paired uniquely with every other card. Put your own words in between them and make them your own!

Something New For The Dealer To Do!

Some of the new Questions in the D Pack have “Fill-in-the-blanks” which will finally give the dealer something fun to do! If one of these cards comes up, the dealer draws a couple cards of that type and chooses one to use as a fill-in. This creates even more variety - every time one of these questions comes up, it’s completely different!

New Rules!

Of course, we also will be adding some amazing new rules to the D pack. They’ll be some new twists on old classics (new accents and bonus phrases) and totally new options as well. The dealer will get to be even more involved this time, and some rules can only be used for certain types of questions.

But wait, there’s more!

The Big D cards are only one piece of the new expansion. In fact, this new expansion is four expansion packs in one because we are straight up crazy.

We’ve got even more to show you this week - stay tuned tomorrow! In the meantime, leave a comment below and let us know what you think!